Bad Boys
by LarielRomeniel
Summary: Jack and the Tenth Doctor exchange some semitall tales of misspent youth. Rating because, well, it's Jack.


**Author's Note: **Written for LiveJournal's Jack ficathon. _War in Heaven _is still in progess, and I hope to post an update within the week.

This is dedicated to the bad little boys in my life, who have committed all but one of the offenses listed in this story.

* * *

Jack Harkness sighed and discarded another swab. _Number 42, _he thought as he reached for a new one, _and still a long way to go._ With another sigh, he began cleaning more of the gray-green sludge that was growing in every crevice it could find under the TARDIS console. 

And there were a lot of crevices.

"How's it going down there, Captain?" The Doctor was looking down at him through the grate of the console room floor.

Jack kept scrubbing. "Slow. This stuff is still spreading. I'm just keeping ahead of it. We could be here a while." He tossed the swab away in his "used" bucket, picked up a new one and dipped it in cleaning solution. The Doctor had insisted that he use this particular solution and cotton wool swabs to reach into all the crevices. "You know, we could get rid of it faster if we just sprayed everything down with some bleach."

"Don't you even think about it!" the Doctor scolded. "My TARDIS is a delicate living thing, and bleach is a corrosive agent. It would be like asking you to take a bath in sulfuric acid. _Boiling_ sulfuric acid. With a nitric acid rinse. And then handing you a steel wool towel to dry off."

"All right, all right, I get your point!" Jack conceded, wincing a little at the mental image. "I'll stick with the tea tree oil. At least it smells better than bleach." He sniffed. "Not by much, though."

"That's your penance for bringing that slime mold on board. Maybe you'll listen next time I tell you not to touch something," the Doctor said, coming down the steps and sitting on the deck near Jack. He picked up a swab and found a crevice to start scrubbing.

Jack looked over at him in surprise. "What are you doing penance for?"

"I'm not. The penance is still for you. I'm just trying to get things moving along. We can't go anywhere until it's all gone, you know." The Doctor threw him a grin.

Jack smiled and shook his head. "Can't stay still for a moment, can you? Rose would say you're hyperactive."

The Doctor's grin turned nostalgic. "As a matter of fact, she did. Quite often."

When Jack first returned to the TARDIS, mentioning Rose's name had been like tearing holes in the Doctor's hearts. And in his own, if Jack was honest with himself. But now, months later, they'd both healed enough to be able to talk about Rose and share fond memories.

This particular chore was evoking other memories. "You know," Jack mused, "the last time I had to do anything like this, I was a Time Agency recruit. Had to scrub every inch of my C.O.'s front hallway. With a toothbrush."

"Found you in bed with his daughter, did he?" the Doctor asked with a knowing chuckle. "Or was it his son?"

"Actually, it was both!" Jack answered. He paused for the Doctor's bark of laughter, then continued, "The C.O. told me later he wouldn't have minded one or the other so much, but both was going over the line."

The Doctor was still snickering as he changed swabs. "Doesn't surprise me at all that your talent for finding trouble showed up at an early age."

"Trouble finds me," Jack replied. "And you know that ancient saying about the pot calling the kettle black? Bet you weren't any little angel either."

"Of course I wasn't an angel," the Doctor scoffed. "Angels are from Elasia, and they're nothing like the fairy creatures in your legends. Typical humans; get visited by an advanced culture and you build a religion around them. The Goa'uld in Egypt, Quetzalcoatl in Latin America, the Kami in Japan…it's amazing how gullible early humans were. Anyone could drop in, do a few tricks and suddenly everyone is bowing and scraping to their new god."

"I'm going to ignore the species insult and point out that you're trying to change the subject."

"Oh, you noticed that?" The Doctor grinned. He thought for a moment. "Well, it was a long time ago. A long, long, _long,_ long long time ago. I had to do something like this," he waved the swab, "in my own home when I was a boy. A boy who was very interested in how things work. I started dabbling in kitchen chemistry. My father would help me most of the time, but one day I was just a bit too impatient and started doing a project on my own. I was creating liquid oxygen and made a little mistake. Know what happens when you do that?"

Jack made a noise and gesture mimicking an explosion. The Doctor nodded. "Exactly! My father walked in and found blue goo all over the room. And all over me. He sent me off to wash up, and when I got back he handed me a scrub brush and put me to work. It took me hours to get the mess cleaned up. And even so, for months we were still finding spots of dried blue goo around. Ooh, try saying that three times fast. Dried blue goo dried blue goo dried blue goo…"

Jack chuckled. "At least the stuff wasn't growing and moving while you were trying to clean it. Look over to your right…that little glob is putting out a pseudopod."

The Doctor reached over and attacked it with the swab. "No, you don't, you vicious slime mold! You're not spreading one more inch in my TARDIS."

"The Oncoming Storm and Scourge of Single-Celled Organisms," Jack teased. "So what did your mother think about the blue goo?"

"She was gone by then," the Doctor replied flatly. Chastened, Jack resumed cleaning in silence. After a minute, the Doctor spoke again. "What about your mother, Jack?"

Jack stopped scrubbing and sat back against one of the support rails, laughing softly. "I put my mom through the wringer. Most of the time she laughed it off…"

"She spoiled you."

"You know it. But there was one time when she really, really got mad at me. Mom was from Quebec, and my grandfather was a very traditional Canuck, right down to the French-Canadian dialect. He came to visit us when I was five. I really wanted to impress him, so when he came through the door, I greeted him in French. But the only French I knew was what I heard from my mom. And the only time she spoke the language was when she was mad at my dad."

The Doctor looked over at him with a grin. "You didn't."

"I did! I cussed my grandfather out. With a perfect accent and inflection," Jack added. "Took about a week to get the taste of soap out of my mouth. And since then, I can't speak French. Not one word."

"Good job the TARDIS handles translations, then," the Doctor smirked. He picked up a fresh swab and moved over to a new section. "Funny how a childhood incident can put you completely off something for the rest of your life."

"Yeah? What did you get put off of?"

"Pets," the Doctor answered. "When I was very, very young, I wanted a pet, but my parents told me I wasn't ready for that kind of responsibility. They thought I was too easily distracted."

"Some things don't change," Jack sniggered.

The Doctor pointed his swab at Jack threateningly. "Mind your manners, Captain. Now, I really wanted a pet. So one day I managed to catch a big, beautiful lizard in the garden and sneak him into my room. I put him in a box that I kept hidden, and brought him big, juicy beetles to eat every day. For a week I was the secret owner of a Gallifreyan skink that I named Sam, who ate an astonishing number of beetles."

"Sam? A human name?"

"I am half-human on my mother's side, Jack. Sam was a character in an Earth book she read to me, about a fellow who liked green eggs and ham. Which, by the way, is a Zigfexellen delicacy. One of these days I'm going to find out how the author knew about it."

Jack shifted to sit cross-legged, and tossed away the cleaning swab in his hand. "So what happened to Sam the Skink? Your parents caught you?"

The Doctor shook his head as he kept cleaning. "Worse. He escaped."

"Uh-oh."

"I was frantic! I searched all over the house, trying _not_ to look like I was searching for something. After about three days, I gave up, thinking he'd gone back to the garden."

Jack leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand. "And how did this put you off pets?"

"Wellll..." the Doctor drawled as he exchanged swabs again, "that's not the end of the story. Sam did turn up not long after. And that's when I found out Sam wasn't a Sam." He paused a beat. "Sam was a _Samantha_. And she wasn't alone. See, female Gallifreyan skinks could hold fertilized eggs in their systems until they find a habitat with plenty of food."

"Or a small boy who'll keep feeding her?" Jack asked, seeing where this was going.

"Right! All those beetles I'd fed her activated her reproductive system. So she had a brood of babies hidden away in a corner of our pantry, behind some sacks of grain. A place I hadn't checked."

"And that's when you got caught."

"Well, yes…but not in the way you might think. Female skinks were normally quite docile, except when they'd given birth. Post-partum hormones made them extremely aggressive, so they'd defend their broods with everything they had. Sam repaid me for all those beetles by biting me!"

"That's gratitude for you," Jack reflected sardonically.

The Doctor held up a finger. "Wait. It gets worse. The post-partum hormones didn't just make Samantha aggressive. They activated a gland that secreted a compound similar to salicylic acid, which got injected by the bite."

Jack thought for just a second. "Salicylic acid is deadly for you."

"Precisely. They found me just in time to administer some anti-venin. Samantha and her babies were taken off to a wildlife preserve."

"What happened after that?"

"My parents decided being poisoned was punishment enough, and I suppose they were right. I haven't wanted a pet since then. And believe me, it hasn't been easy to deal with reptilian races, either. I keep suspecting that they want to take a chunk out of my posterior."

_Did he just say…?_ "Wait a minute. You mean Sam the Skink bit you in the butt?"

"I think it's a corollary of Murphy's Law. Do someone a good turn, and it will get you in the end," the Doctor deadpanned.

Jack threw his head back to laugh long and loud, while the Doctor calmly continued wiping away mold. After a few minutes, he wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. "I can't possibly top that one. You finish up, and I'll go check on Martha. See if that antihistamine helped with her allergic reaction to the mold." He went up the steps, and when he reached the top, called down, "By the way, Doctor, you're dong a great job down there. Keep it up!"

The not-entirely-retired con man sauntered out of the console room, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It didn't take long.

_"JACK HARKNESS!"_

Jack chuckled as he headed off in search of Martha. "Yep, still got it."


End file.
